


Ghost in My Lungs

by orphan_account



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Blood, Dreams, Ghosts, M/M, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Rough Sex, S&M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 14:11:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1713461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Master may be dead, but somewhere within the circuits of the TARDIS, an imprint of his mind lives on.</p>
<p>"His dreams begin to turn to nightmares, which start to feel more and more like memories with each passing night. The images that haunt him are sometimes vivid scenes from the War filled with the howling of the vortex, and other times something as simple as dreams of himself, alone, wandering through the TARDIS’s corridors looking for something and never finding it. He awakes quivering from either. And so he makes the choice simply not to sleep."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost in My Lungs

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some point between NuWho seasons 3 and 4.

He’d healed her to the best of his ability, with both the care of a parent and the precision of an engineer. She’s been much more unsteady since the incident, less quick to trust, locking up rooms and seemingly flinching at his touches. It’s hard for him to blame the TARDIS for being insecure after what had happened to her. The Master had reaved her mind, put his hands on her switches and dials with a ferocity that could best be described as a grotesque parody of her Doctor’s loving touch, ripped wires from their circuits and crossed them into sinister patterns that were never meant to be. He’d made her shine red, red like hatred, like fire, like the blood of the people who she unwillingly helped to kill throughout a year that no longer existed. Something like that is hard to recover from.

Even as her Doctor heals her, stitches up the circuitboards, returns each torn-out cog to its rightful place, there is always something left behind. A residue, a shadow, the trace of washed-away fingerprints. Sometimes, when the Doctor walks her corridors alone, he swears he can see flames licking at a funeral pyre. In the moments where he waits to fall asleep, he can half-hear a voice in his mind. It tells him old stories that he would like to forget.

His dreams begin to turn to nightmares, which start to feel more and more like memories with each passing night. The images that haunt him are sometimes vivid scenes from the War filled with the howling of the vortex, and other times something as simple as dreams of himself, alone, wandering through the TARDIS’s corridors looking for _something_ and never finding it. He awakes quivering from either. And so he makes the choice simply not to sleep.

The time comes when the Doctor can no longer tell if he is awake or dreaming. He is in his ship, he is alone, and he hears a voice. _“You could’ve been so different,”_ it tells him, whispering like Eve's serpent.

“Oh, how _wonderful._ It’s you, here to act as a symbol for all my guilt,” he says. “Get out of my mind. I watched you die. It’s finished, and there's nothing I can change.”

“But what makes you think I am only in your mind?” The voice becomes clearer. He has no doubt who it belongs to.

“I’ve been around the universe. I’ve heard an awful lot of stories, seen an awful lot of fakes, and overall learned that I do not believe in ghosts.”

“Turn around, Doctor.” The Doctor obeys without thinking, and he sees that the voice has a form. A shade, an imitation of a living thing, with imitations of flesh and skin.

“Get away from my mind.” He strikes it, and it dissipates into air.

Another night, or morning or afternoon, he is not sure, his ghost returns. It whispers through the wires; it appears before him once again. Only this time, it looks much more real than before. Its skin is still a hue off, still too glossy in texture to be the Master’s, and its face is just distant enough from the genuine article as to feel uncanny. “Oh, Doctor. Why do you still try to run away from yourself?”

The Doctor does not respond. He hopes that perhaps, if he ignores his delusions, he will be able to take command of his mind and vanish them. He walks along, continues through the corridors to nowhere in particular.

The Master’s ghost is persistent, though. “If I remember correctly, you begged me to live in this old bucket of bolts with you. What made that change?”

“Because you aren’t _real_.”

“Oh? How do you know that so certainly?” The Master places a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, a hand that moves with too much fluidity to be made from real flesh and blood.

“An imprint of your consciousness living in the TARDIS? Well, first off, it would be way too convenient for me.”

“Convenient, Doctor?”

The Doctor sighs, pulls a deep breath into his chest. “For all my selfish reasons. If you were some sort of data ghost, I could bring you back. I could atone for one life I’ve ruined, at least.”

“That and your desperation not to be alone.” The Master gives a smirk, one which threatens to distort his almost-face into unrecognizability. “Let’s be real, though. I’d never be your pet. And that’s not what you want at all, is it?”

The Doctor closes his eyes, clenches his hands into fists. And he thrusts them through the projection. He forces it to leave his sight.

But the next day, the Master’s ghost returns to him, and this time, he is practically alive. He possesses the same fury, the same fire that the Doctor saw so many times aboard the Valiant: the most recent iteration of the flame that has existed through his every incarnation. “Do you still believe I’m not really here, Doctor?”

“I… don’t know,” the Doctor stutters as the Master’s body presses against him and he feels a surge of heat building in his mind.

“When you get right down to it,” the Master whispers, hand cupping the Doctor’s chin, “What is ‘real?’ Timelines that have been erased, do they exist? Are things that happen in distant universes real to us? And when you can see me and feel me, when you _want_ to feel, to see, does it even matter at all?”

He pulls the Doctor into a kiss, and it is a cruel one: all teeth and tongue, it leaves a sting. And suddenly the Doctor feels that he is truly awake. “Master…” he cries.

“Funny,” the Master respongs, “How hearing you say my name has lost its… sparkle.”

_“Sparkle?”_ The Doctor quirks an eyebrow.

“The magic, the pizzazz. That little thing in your voice that lets me know without a doubt that you’re mine.” He presses his lips upon the Doctor’s ear. “Tell me, Doctor. What do you want?”

“I want you. Whether you’re real or not.”

The Master runs his hands over the hardening bulge in the Doctor’s trousers, so slowly that it is agonizing. “And what is it that you want from me?”

The Doctor pants, “I want you to hurt me.”

The Master laughs: a dark and fierce chuckle. “Atonement, no, _punishment_ for the things you’ve done.” He commands, “Strip for me, Doctor.”

As the Doctor fumbles with the buttons of his shirt, he thinks, _oh Rassilon, I’m really doing this, I’m stripping myself bare for a ghost, or for my own delusion._ He wonders how much lower he can fall, he, the one humanity has looked to as a saviour now reduced to half-dreaming madness.

“Would you like me to fuck your throat, Doctor?” He is practically purring.

_“Please, please just touch me, touch me...”_

"Do you ever stop speaking at a thousand miles an hour in this body?" The Master smirks, catlike, as he unzips his fly. "No more words now."

The Doctor parts his lips, looks at the Master with his eyes dark and pained and oh so full of longing. And as the Master forcefully enters his mouth, oh, his eyes speak more than any words could. He loves the humiliation, the submission of kneeling at his Master's feet, of sucking his Master's cock. He drinks in every mercurial expression that flutters across the Master's face in the throes of ecstasy.

The Master comes with furious breath, and the Doctor realizes just how much he has missed his taste: all the sweetness and all the bitterness.

His cock is achingly hard, yearning for release, but the Master commands that he does not touch it. He is forced to wait in anticipative agony as the Master kisses him again, first on his forehead, then his lips, then his neck. Each one is like a bite: fiercely intense, hurting in an exquisite way, leaving behind white marks on his skin that instantly begin to fade to red. He can tell that they will eventually turn to blue-black, to a chain of opals running down his body- from his head to his neck to his chest to his tummy to… _oh…_

“Turn around, Doctor. Face the wall.”

The Doctor complies. There are no restraints on him, but there don’t need to be. He dares not move. He feels a sudden jolt of coldness as the Master pushes a slicked finger inside of him. Then another finger. He bites down on his lower lip suddenly with surprising force as pleasure and pain begin to intertwine. “Please, please,” he sighs.

The Master’s fingernails rake down his back viciously, and he feels like a fawn in the grip of a tiger as he hurts. That’s not true, though; he knows he is no suffering innocent, he’ll never be, not even in his moments of pretending. But as he feels the warmth that he knows is blood dripping down his skin, as he feels the Master’s cock thrust inside him, the delusion that his wrongdoings can be redeemed almost seems real.

The pleasure-pain reaches its pinnacle, and suddenly there is no future and no past. There is only _now_ , the moment of release stretching out to eternity: an infinite, agonizing, beautiful now. He whispers, he screams the only word he remembers, the only thing that exists in this moment, _“Master.”_

“Was that enough sparkle?” he says as he returns to his reality between dreams. But the ghost is gone, leaving only wounds as memories.


End file.
